It's Not A Marathon

Tabs was off earlier this week because I spent Saturday, Sunday, and Monday renewing my Wilderness First Responder certification. WFR is a level of pre-hospital medical training about halfway between first aid and EMT, aimed at developing the skills needed to identify and manage life threats in a wilderness environment. On our Monday afternoon lunch break, on my way to the Dysart’s in Orono¹ to get a saran-wrapped sandwich and a bag of chips, I made the mistake of briefly turning on the radio in my car. NPR was broadcasting Trump’s second inaugural address, and I heard him promise to rename the Gulf of Mexico and Denali, take back the Panama Canal, and conquer Mars. That seemed like enough of that; I turned it off. Aside from that jarring couple of minutes I was busy all weekend re-learning how to assess a patient for spinal injuries, how to detect early signs of shock, how to manage hypothermia, and so on. How to be of some use when someone else is having the worst day of their life. I was far too busy to fret about the news.

In 2016, shortly after Trump was elected president for the first time, I joined the Democratic Socialists of America. It’s excruciating to look back at that 2016 me, a tiny damp baby, a mere infant of forty years, shocked to his very core that America could elect someone so manifestly hateful and unfit. A little sheltered toddler who desperately wanted to do something about all this. I know, I know. What you’re thinking right now? It could be any of several things, and believe me whichever it is, I know. Hashtag This Is Not Normal.

I’m a confident, six foot tall, well-spoken cisgender white man in the United States of America, so every group I join rapidly attempts to put me in charge. The Southern Maine chapter of the DSA was no exception, but it became clear that I am not cut out to sit in a chilly meeting room and consult Roberts’ Rules of Order while debating organizational policy minutia for a subcommittee which may or may not eventually influence the municipal regulations of a small northeastern city (a little bit, perhaps). Despite the organization’s explicitly political framing and intent, it was never clear to me how we were planning to address any of the big problems that had brought us all there. By January of 2018, when a New Yorker article about the company I worked for at the time mentioned my DSA membership, I had already resigned.

I spent a long time feeling guilty about that. Had I quit too easily? I never stopped wanting to do something, but I couldn’t figure out how all those meetings were actually helping anyone. So as the first Trump administration ground on, I worked at my software job and followed the news obsessively and felt as helpless as everyone else.

Also around that time I started taking longer trips into the backcountry with my two older kids. The three of us did a four day hike in the Mahoosuc range in 2016, and a five day paddling trip on the west branch of the Penobscot River and Chesuncook Lake in 2017. I watched them struggle with the physical challenges but also discover the sense of freedom and adventure that the wilderness always brought me. But I also gradually realized that if anything went wrong I was entirely responsible for their health and safety. And I didn’t know anything. So in early 2019 I took my first WFR class.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a man in possession of a wilderness first responder certificate must be in want of a search and rescue team to justify maintaining it. So it was for me, and by the end of the year I had joined a SAR team in my area. Five years later I’m still a member, and I’ve also since gotten an EMT license, gotten myself trained for technical rope rescue, and now renewed my WFR for the second time.

It feels frivolous, sometimes, to dedicate all my volunteer energy to the slim chance that I might potentially one day assist someone who probably got in trouble doing something recreational in the first place. Maybe it is. I’ve only been called out a small handful of times, but for five years now I’ve dedicated about ten hours a month to meetings and training. Partly I do it because I believe that people need to get out and engage with the outdoors if we want to have any hope of understanding our responsibility to preserve it. And partly I do it because search and rescue is also called to look for elderly people who’ve wandered away from home, mentally handicapped people in crisis, and to find the bodies of people who have gone into the wilderness to kill themselves. I deeply believe that those people and their loved ones deserve help and closure, and I know that I have the skills and experience to help them. It’s a concrete thing I can do.

I joined search and rescue because I wanted to help people, but if I’m honest that doesn’t happen very often, and it’s not really why I still do it. I actually do it because it means that every month I have at least one good excuse to spend some time with people I like, people who share my enthusiasms and know interesting things they’re willing to teach me. We go out in the woods and do cool stuff together. It’s fun.

In 2016, and again during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, I kept hearing “It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon.” I thought I understood that at the time. You can’t solve every problem at once, right? It will require patience. It’ll take some time. But now after losing re-election once, an attempted coup, two impeachments, thirty four felony convictions, and everything else we’ve been through in the past eight years, President Trump is back, and there’s very little standing against him anymore. Not the courts, or the Congress, or the media. There’s no real sign of a mass opposition movement. The oligarchs have had a chance to reconsider their initial aesthetic aversion and decide that, fascism looks pretty good these days. We’re not in a marathon. A marathon is a long way to run but it still starts and ends on the same day. It’s not a marathon, it’s not a state of emergency. For anyone who doesn’t want to roll America back to 1864, this is the rest of our lives.

The new administration has been busy this week sieg heiling and then making smirky Nazi jokes about it, attempting to restore pre-1965 segregation in federal hiring practices, pardoning 1,500 insurrectionists and a guy who got rich taking a cut of drug sales on the dark web, and a firehose of other shit. You and I can spend all our time paying attention to this, if we want to. There’s likely nothing we can do about any of it, and what will hold up in court, what will have real repercussions for real people, and what is just “we must conquer Mars” nonsense is yet to be determined.

My job here at Tabs is usually to follow this sort of thing closely and tell you if any of it matters, but this week I don’t want to. If you also spent the week glued to your feeds, you already know how it felt, and if not you made the right choice. You didn’t miss anything. Instead I just want to encourage you to join something. Please don’t feel like it has to be a political organization, unless you absolutely love Roberts’ Rules of Order. Find a group of people doing something you like, and join them. Join a bowling league. Find a book group. Join a church, or a mosque, or a synagogue, if that’s the way your heart leans. If the first thing you try doesn’t bring you joy, try something else.

It took me a lot longer than it should have but eventually I realized that I don’t need to feel guilty about not sticking with the DSA. And I realized that search and rescue isn’t frivolous, and it wouldn’t be even if it was a disc golf team, or a neighborhood dinner swap, or a knitting circle, or a biking group. This isn’t a marathon, this is the rest of my life, and what gets me through it isn’t eternal helpless vigilance or angry posting. It’s forming connections with other people around activities that bring me joy. It’s building trust, so that when some goose-stepping fuck tries to make me afraid of my neighbors, I can laugh at him.

That’s my sermon for the week! Thanks to Delia Cai for making fun of this post before I had even finished writing it:

Lol, roasted.

Tom Scocca wrote the only recap you need of the Elon Musk Nazi salute discourse. John Ganz unearthed some rare Arendt. Cat and Girl pondered why everything is so broken. And if you only read one thing about the inauguration, which is the absolute most you should read, make it Hamilton Nolan’s “You Are Invited to the Predators' Ball, as Food.”

In Other News: Jude Doyle wrote about what Neil Gaiman fans are supposed to do now. Leila Brillson also wrote about what Neil Gaiman fans are supposed to do now. I thought they were both good posts, and if you don’t care about Neil Gaiman they’re both about what we’re supposed to do when someone who made art that means a lot to us turns out to be a monster, and if that hasn’t happened to you yet, it will.

And Lindsey Adler wrote about being a 23 year old in the media industry in 2013, which was both a golden age with the lifespan of a mayfly, and a complete hoax.

2014: Definitively not real.

Grand Theft Hamlet:

Today’s Song: “We’ve Been Here Before,” Chinese Man ft. Stogie T, Isadora & Miscellaneous

1  What’s up, my Mainers.